Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont Profile 274pp, £9.99 in UK
The Baudrillardean conspiracy theory would go something like this: modern French philosophy doesn't exist. What we think of as French philosophy is a post-modern simulacrum, cobbled together from odds and ends of science, linguistics, anthropology, sociology and feminism. Packaged for export, it seeks chiefly to impress gullible academics, mainly in English departments, and to send rationalists into spasms of outrage.
Unfortunately, and like most ideas inspired by Jean Baudrillard, this doesn't get us very far. Modern French philosophy does exist, and in 1996 Alan Sokal decided to do something about it. As an exercise in French-derived absurdity he composed an article, "Transgressive Boundaries: Toward a Hermeneutic of Transformative Gravity", and submitted it to the theoretical journal Social Text. His objective was simple: to confirm his suspicions that grotesque abuses of scientific language pass unchecked in the social sciences and humanities today. What to Sokal were the most basic questions of all for someone presenting a scientific or philosophical argument - what does this mean? is this true of false? - seem never to have occurred to the yawning editors of Social Text, who were only too happy to publish it.
Reprinted as an appendix to Intellectual Impostures, the essay is a classic of obscurantist mystagoguery. Thanks to post-modern theory, Sokal solemnly informs us, "the pi of Euclid and the G of Newton, formerly thought of to be constant and universal, are now perceived in their ineluctable historicity". And could it have been the influence of Victorian liberalism that prompted the "hegemonic Zermelo-Fraenkel framework" to adopt the axioms of equality and choice? This is, needless to say, complete gibberish. The Mathematics Department of Swift's Balnibarbi Academy could not have done a better job. Nor was it all a flight of Sokal's unassisted fancy: the essay came battle-dressed in more than a hundred footnotes, backing up his every claim with chapter and verse from Althusser, Lyotard, Derrida and friends.
After publication in Social Text, Sokal went public, starting a debate that came to assume the proportions of an academic Ern Malley affair. He offered Social Text an account of what was wrong with the original article and why he had done it; this was peevishly rejected for failing to meet the journal's exalted "intellectual standards". Now comes Intellectual Impostures, not a hoax this time but a dossier of the crimes against science perpetrated by the thinkers that Sokal had parodied. These include Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Latour, Baudrillard, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari. As scientists, Sokal and Bricmont expressly disavow any interest in judging these thinkers' pronouncements on literature or politics; the focus is strictly on their excursions into the language of science.
They needn't have worried about running short of material. Lacan and Kristeva slash and burn their way through anything remotely coherent that stands in the way of their pseudo-scientific pomposities. To be fair to Kristeva, all the quotations from her work come from the Seventies, the high noon of scatter-gun theorising, but her sour reaction to Intellectual Impostures in Le Nouvel Observateur ("Disinformation . . . an intellectually and politically insignificant product") shows how hard some old habits die. Luce Irigaray ludicrously suggests that E = MC2 is sexist because of its privileging "what goes fastest". What exactly does she think sex has to do with the speed of light? I'd love to know. This sounds hard to beat, but Felix Guattari does even better in a two-page extract from Chaosmosis. As the authors of Intellectual Impostures comment, "only a genius could have written it", such is its heroic devotion to nonsense.
The crux of Sokal and Bricmont's argument is epistemic relativism. This is the belief that science is just one more discourse alongside all the rest in our postmodern world, and as such devoid of any special claims to universality. Thus many cultural theorists, keen to redress the wrongs of the Enlightenment, will argue that if enough people want to believe in the Hopi Indian creation myth (or the Book of Genesis), it is no better or worse than the Big Bang theory. The tragedy of this for the left-wing authors of Intellectual Impostures is that, instead of liberating students, it allows lecturers to feed them any old fairy tale they want in the name of cultural self-esteem. It also disarms leftist critiques of third-world cultural practices (e.g. female circumcision) when they are seen to proceed from a patronising belief in Enlightenment reason. There could hardly be a more effective way of stifling genuine academic liberation.
At this point I must enter a caveat. When it was published in French, Intellectual Impostures received a lot of attention from the usual bunch of anti-intellectuals, neo-conservatives and plain old Frog-haters only too glad to find their prejudices so splendidly confirmed. Recognise these people for the cynical opportunists they are. Facile oppositions of left and right, theory and common sense, them and us, are irrelevant to the real point of this book, the sorting out of the true from the false. The only method, as T.S. Eliot said, is extreme intelligence. But the only extremes touched by Virilio, Irigaray, Baudrillard and Co. are of obfuscation, cant and charlatanism.
Reading Intellectual Impostures, I was reminded of the suggestion of Simone Weil (no pseud she) that readers who discover factual errors in books should be able to "bring an action empowered to condemn a convicted offender to prison or hard labour". While hard labour might be an extreme response to the howlers recorded here, one hopes that Sokal and Bricmont's book will not pass without some practical results. We expect politicians caught pulling a fast one to be hauled up before a tribunal, so why not academics, too? Or is the concept of intellectual accountability too old-fashioned a wheel on which to break the delicate butterfly of tenured post-modern playfulness? As another French philosopher, Voltaire, used to say: Ecrasez l'infame!
David Wheatley is a poet and critic.